- Fancy plane rides, pink Lamborghinis, and giant homes in California. Influencers love to
flaunt a lavish lifestyle but what would actually
happen to the planet if everybody lived like an influencer? - Better yet, how many
Earths would we need to sustain the lifestyle
of everyone saying, "Make sure you give
this video a thumbs up. "Make sure you like, subscribe, "and you comp that merch below, bro." - Let's start with- - Driving, the thing I hate most on Earth. The most famous
influencers live in America where 6 million cars
are purchased each year. And in the year 2015, Americans'
combined driving length was from Earth to Pluto
and back 500 times. Most specifically though,
influencers live here in the epicenter of the
entertainment industry, La La Land. You might be a romantic and think of L.A. as the city of leading
men swinging their arms and dancing on the big screen. But now it's more like beefcake
men swinging something else on this small screen. In L.A., on average people
drive 9.3 miles per day, which feels insane when you're
from a place like Toronto, but it's actually 54% less than the rest of Southern California. This is because many Angelenos, which is what you're called
when you live in L.A. which is kind of amazing,
take public transit. But when is the last
time you saw a vlogger or YouTuber on a bus? They'd be like, "Oh my God, is this on? "Do I look okay? (gasps) "It's taking a lot for
me to tell you this, "and you know how much I love you guys. "Something really crazy happened to me. "Like story time, okay. "I had to take a bus." (dramatic instrumental music) - And the cream of the crop
celebrities or influencers live here in the West L.A.
hills, aka the Hollywood Hills. According to public data,
people who live here drive the most out of
everyone in all of L.A., and things add up quickly
as any employee or friend also needs to drive up into these hills to get to your house, leading to an average
of 11.1 vehicle miles traveled per day. This is why we constantly
see influencers making videos in their car like this. - Hi, sisters.
- Hi. (group laughing) - Oh my gosh, that was kind of scary. - Also, did you know that
20% of meals in America are actually eaten in the car? (sighs) The American dream. - I feel guilty. (crunches) - But if we're all rich influencers, we can afford to buy an electric vehicle like a Tesla, right? Let's assume we can. Buying a Tesla is still actually
worse for the environment than taking public transit, and charging it still relies
on the current power grid. Also, I am aware of the irony
of me filming this in our car. I mean, we're influencers after all. ♪ Nobody's perfect ♪ - And since we're in
Cali, it's not that bad. California has amazing
renewable energy sources. In 2018 only 3.3% of the
power grid came from coal and 0.16 came from crude oil, compared to the rest of America
where 13.1% comes from coal and 36.4 from crude oil. So charging a Tesla in
L.A. is pretty green compared to the rest of
America and even the world. But California still relies
pretty heavily on natural gas, not to mention the raw materials it takes to make a Tesla
in the first place. When you add it all up, it starts taking a toll on the Earth. Based on eco footprint calculations, we would need 4.3 Earth to sustain a world where everyone had the
same driving lifestyle as an influencer. That's just based off of driving in some pretty ideal conditions. But what about their-
- Mansions? Huge houses require a lot
of energy and electricity. To start, Americans consume
15% of the world's energy and 20% of the world's electricity, but make up only 4% of
the world's population. For context, the people of
India and Sub-Saharan Africa consume only 10% of
the world's electricity but make up 33% of the world's population. Influencers tend to flaunt
these large, gorgeous, costly homes, but the
true cost is on the Earth. Take just air conditioning for example. More than half of the air
conditioning units in the world are in China and the U.S., and keeping them running uses
2.5 times more electricity than the whole continent
of Africa uses in a year. One study I found calculated
that 6% of all electricity in the U.S. is used for air conditioning, and air conditioning our homes causes more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year. Not to mention the cement
or concrete that's needed to build these large
homes as, surprisingly, concrete accounts for 5% of
global carbon dioxide emissions and is the second most consumed substance on Earth after water. But a lot of these
influencers do their best. They carpool. They don't always eat meat. They are minimalists. Is that what this is? This looks like an evil
villain's lair in a Disney movie. Even if we assume that these
influencers never eat meat and that they have some
energy efficient appliances in their home, you can run
a calculation to find out that if we all drove and had
mansions like L.A. influencers we would need 10.9 Earths
to sustain the lifestyle. - So hold up. How are we calculating
the amount of Earths? Using geographical locations
and behavioral averages for income and neighborhood information, we can measure an
influencer's global hectares. This measurement looks
at how much land, sea, and other resources are needed to produce what each person's global
hectare will be per year. And there's many online calculators
where you can figure out your own eco footprint. But we're actually gonna
need a lot more Earths because influencers, and us
right now, are using a service that emits a lot more carbon
dioxide than you might think, and that is-
- Online video platforms. The energy needed to
store, deliver, distribute, and even watch online video
leads to 0.4 kilograms of CO2 emissions per hour. In 2018, 228.8 million people in the U.S. watched digital content
for 82 minutes each day, adding 1.3 billion kilograms of CO2 to the atmosphere per year. So if we all became online influencers, our CO2 release would be astronomical. Plus, we'd be uploading so much and then downloading so much, so the servers and energy
to cool the servers would be insane. Did you know that they're
trying to put servers up in the Arctic so we don't
have to spend as much money trying to cool them and as much
energy trying to cool them? Either way, uploading and
downloading all this video would be really bad for the planet. Not to mention-
- The closet. (sighs) Back in the closet, I see. ♪ Hello darkness, my old friend ♪ - The fashion industry is the
second most polluting industry in the world, responsible for 10% of
greenhouse gas emissions. MIT calculated that the global impact of producing polyester
alone was somewhere around 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about what 185 coal-fired
power plants emit in a year. Let alone selling the products. So if 80% of people in the majority world shopped like influencers in L.A., we would see a 77% increase
in carbon dioxide emissions associated with clothing production, a 20% increase in water usage,
and 7% increase in land use. Who knew you'd have a gay
man telling you to shop less. Usually, we just have girls being like, "Oh my God, be my gay best friend. "Come shopping with me." It's like, "Honey, if it
ain't a circular economy, "it ain't happening." Not really killing it as the gay best friend right now, am I? We'll include all that
info in the final tally of global hectares, but
before we get to that, let's talk about an
influencer's favorite substance, and I don't mean tummy tea. I mean-
- Oil. Half the world's oil is consumed by only 17% of the world's population. These countries are
known as the OECD nations and they are also responsible for 33% of the world's CO2 emissions. America itself produces 15%
of the world's CO2 emissions, compared to Bangladesh who
has half the population but only produces 1% of the
world's CO2 emissions per year. Remember the sprawling
mansions we mentioned earlier? People in Bangladesh do not live in these. The 163 million people of Bangladesh live within their country, which is the size of about Alabama. Americans, on average, consume
10 liters of oil a day, but we Canadians fare even worse at 10.2 liters of oil a day, compared to a Bangladeshi who only uses 0.1 liters of oil per day. A lot of this oil is used up from flying, which is something that
influencers love to do even during a global pandemic. Ding. Even if we keep the
influencer lifestyle vegan, we're also gonna assume that they're pretty much
shopping only local. They got those expensive
L.A. grocery stores. We're gonna include a
flight from New York to L.A. every two months, which I think is actually
being kind of generous for influencer lifestyles
when you study them, but we're gonna put that in as a well. We discovered that if everyone
lived like an influencer, we would need 12.9 Earths
to sustain the lifestyle. (crickets chirping) So what can we collectively
take away from this? - Video to dissect the idea
of the aspirational lifestyle that affects all of us, including us. I mean, like I've got
a fig tree back there. I want it to look pretty. We're all impacted by
the consumption habits we see online and in media. But if we all lived like Bangladeshis, we would only need this much of the Earth to sustain all life, which is astounding. And in our current climate crisis, are these not in some ways
an aspirational lifestyle? I know this can get complex and muddy when we talk about poverty
or the quality of life, but the Global Happiness
Council found that in 2017, Americans were the
unhappiest they'd ever been since starting that initiative, even though they were
working, eating, driving, and consuming more than ever. In fact, if we came together as a species and evenly distributed our
fuel and energy consumption across the 7 billion
people on this planet, we would all have the same energy use as somebody in Switzerland in the 1960s. Look at those gorg trams. Look at those cute little outfits. They honestly look happy. And the life expectancy of
somebody in Switzerland in 1965 was the same as it is in America today, which is much higher
than the world average. For more information on this, you can check out our podcast on YouTube which is all about influencers with a link in the description. Ultimately, we're not advocating to live in substandard conditions
but to just question are we actually in better
condition today now when we're consuming more than
we might've been in the past? And can we reevaluate our
beliefs and our ideals about this aspirational lifestyle and what it means to have lots of things? - And now let's talk about
the elephant in the room. We are from Canada, if you cannot tell. We drive around in giant-ass
vehicles like that one. Please blur out the license
plate or we could get sued. That's a gas-guzzling
machine if I've ever seen. So just by living in our culture, we are treating the world unfairly. We are contributing to CO2
emissions more than most people on this Earth. And although Mitch and
I like to call ourselves queer science educators who
try to use comedy and drawings to make sure that science is for everyone, sometimes my friends will
go to a party and say, "Oh, this is my friend, Greg. "He's an influencer." (vomits) At this point, I will usually
push them over, smash a plate, and drop kick them in the face. - Something we can try
and work on as influencers is to stop selling this
culture of consumption and money and capitalism. - [Greg] First-class fun. - [Mitch] Yeah, like the luxury of it all because we know that's not good for the environment or the planet, even though it does well
on the YouTube algorithm. - [Greg] It honestly does. Mansion tours all over the place. - I just think it would
be cool if culturally, and I see this movement slowly happening, we could agree that it's
actually not that interesting to just have lots of money, to just buy things that
are way too expensive that in the first place
often exploit places that don't have as much money. - Yes, the responsibility
is always on corporations, like YouTube and Google
and the government, but we as people also have to have a hand in thinking critically about these wealthy, luxurious lifestyles and what we actually think
is quote-unquote cool. The climate crisis is gonna be probably the most defining thing that happens in our lifetime. And we know that like dominating
our natural environments to create these wealthy
lifestyles is not going to help. So yes, we are influencers
who made this video. (laughs) - Classic. I know it's a lot harder than it sounds. You can't just change culture overnight. But I do think it would be interesting to challenge the ideas
that luxury and opulence- - And wealth and consumption.
- And all these things are something that we
should all desire and want because they're literally impossible. We would need 12.9 Earths to sustain them. - Thank you for watching this. Comment below your opinions. We're so curious. We're thinking about
this stuff all the time. Subscribe for more science and climate change-related videos, and we will see you next week. Peace.
- See ya.
